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Would you describe yourself as “creative?”

It seems to me that many people believe “creative” is synonymous with “artistic.” We often picture musicians in studios, painters with canvas, and writers in a coffee shop—not a neighbor’s alleyway garden, a co-worker’s color-coded calendar, or a satisfying sandwich of this week’s leftovers.

Perhaps one of the last places we think to look for creativity is in our schools, especially in the janitor’s closet. My Grandpa Mulder was not an artist; he was a farmer, a feed mill operator, and—by the time I came along—the custodian of the Christian high school I eventually attended. But I would argue that while Grandpa was not an artist in any traditional sense, he was incredibly creative.

Grandpa Mulder was the sort of man who could look at a problem, think for a minute, and come up with an innovative solution using whatever he had on hand at the moment. It wasn’t always beautiful, but it was functional—the things he innovated worked. And he could be so playful! It was the mid-1980s, and skater culture was huge in southern California where I grew up. Grandpa saw kids riding their boards around the school grounds and had an idea. Shortly thereafter, you would regularly see him efficiently zipping around campus on his own skateboard, with a garbage can in each of his huge hands. He saw a great idea, adapted it, and made it his own. The kids loved him, the teachers loved him, the administrators loved him—he was a positive presence around school who took great joy and delight in his work. And on his beat-up Ford Econoline van he had a bumper sticker that captured so much of this creative, playful philosophy; it read “I’ve done so much with so little for so long, now I can do anything with nothing!” A joke, of course, but it illustrates Grandpa’s capacity to innovate with anything he had at hand.

I am not a school custodian, but I like to think I have been able to apply a little of Grandpa Mulder’s wisdom to my own work in schools as a professional educator. Today, I have the pleasure of teaching people how to become teachers. This is, I think, the best—and perhaps strangest—job in the world. Do you think of teaching as a particularly creative line of work? Maybe it seems like mundane and straightforward work to you: follow the teacher’s guide, pass out some papers, give them a quiz, assign some homework, assign them a grade. How creative can it be?

Maybe you’re picturing the most creative parts of teaching as putting up bulletin boards, or making cutesy worksheets with pictures of clipart kids, or deciding which graphics to include in the slide decks to illustrate a lecture. Whether through our own classroom experiences or the way media has painted teaching, the profession may seem, at best, structured and not creative.

I sometimes wonder if this is part of the reason for a declining interest in the profession; it seems like uninspired work. I’d like to challenge this line of thinking and encourage us to reframe creativity, both in the classroom and beyond. In one of our introductory education courses, I spend some time helping future teachers identify the joys and challenges of the teaching profession, encouraging them to consider the imagination it takes to cultivate growth throughout our careers—a process I call “always becoming and never arriving.”[1] Teaching truly is a work of imagination—creating a world where students can play around with ideas, explore new horizons, make connections, build upon concepts they’ve already mastered, and create representations of their learning. Great teachers can imagine ways of moving their students from “novice” to “knower,” and plot out pathways that help each one achieve deep understanding. This often sounds daunting to the future teachers I serve, and I understand that impulse! Teaching is not for the faint of heart.

But I must confess, there is a phrase that future teachers sometimes say to me that drives me bonkers: “Dr. Mulder, I get what you’re saying about ‘imagination’ and all that…but I’m just not that creative.”

Not that creative? Not that creative? Oh, when I hear that, I sort of want to shake them by shoulders and say, “You are created in the image of the Creator—you were created to create!”

I do not do this, of course, but the impulse is there. I think the problem is that they are equating creativity with being artistic. They are thinking of the bulletin boards and cutesy worksheets and slide decks, and perhaps feeling like they just don’t enjoy that sort of work. While it’s true that artistry certainly involves creativity, I’m not convinced that these are the same thing. Creativity is bigger and richer and more comprehensive than just making art—as Grandpa Mulder’s approach taught me.

What if we framed creativity as resourcefulness and flexibility? Resourcefulness is the capacity to see the different tools, materials, sources of information, and ideas you have at your disposal, and draw from them to generate solutions to problems. Flexibility is the capacity to hold on to a plan loosely, to practice playfulness, and to read the room and respond appropriately.

In teaching—and in many other parts of life—we develop plans, and then we put those plans into action. Resourcefulness shows up clearly in the planning. When we are using our resources, we’re drawing from different sources of information, pulling in expertise from other people, leveraging technology, and putting these pieces together to craft lessons that will positively impact our students’ learning. Resourcefulness is a key part of the work of creating plans! And flexibility is most evident in the execution. Teachers must be able to roll with things that pop up in the moment—whether that’s managing an unexpected distraction, redirecting students to more productive behaviors, or realizing that our best-laid plans aren’t crystal clear for the students, and pivoting on the fly to try something different. Flexibility in the implementation is creative thinking in action. And, honestly, this was the crux of Grandpa Mulder’s work as well: he was the epitome of resourcefulness, and he was able to flexibly adapt the things he knew to just make things work.

This is the wonder of what it means to be created in the image of the Creator: there is so much potential in the creation, and God has given us the capacity to unfold that potential in innovation, playfulness, and generativity. I believe that resourcefulness and flexibility are good and right ways to live out the creative capacities that are part of how God’s design for our lives.

Let’s embrace the opportunities to find creativity in the ordinary, everyday moments of our lives. Where have you seen others designing, adapting, repurposing, or building? By reframing creativity as resourcefulness and flexibility, we open up new possibilities in our work, relationships, and communities. What will you create today?